As if Big Tech weren't powerful enough already, recent decisions by the Supreme Court will give some of the most valuable companies in the world more latitude to undermine the government’s ability to rein them in, according to legal experts to whom WIRED spoke.
"This has been a bad couple of weeks for regulatory agencies, it's been a bad couple of weeks for the rule of law, and it's been really terrible for consumers," said David Vladeck, a professor at Georgetown Law and former director of the Federal Trade Commission's Consumer Protection Bureau.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) ruled enforcement decisions by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in fraud cases should be litigated in court, a decision that could carry over to other agencies. The next day, the court voted to overturn a key precedent known as the Chevron doctrine, which emerged from the 1984 ruling on Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. The doctrine gave federal agencies the power to interpret laws when rulemaking and ensured that lower courts deferred to them. Now, courts will get to decide how much deference to give regulators’ decisions—and the same conservative legal movement that led to the Supreme Court’s decisions over the past week has infiltrated lower courts as well.
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